Clubbing
by AstroGirl
Summary: Stark and Crichton go out on the town... and promptly get into trouble, of course.


**Clubbing  
by AstroGirl**

As soon as Stark walked into the club, he immediately tried to turn around and walk back out again. It was entirely too much: discordant music, strobing lights, babbling voices. It reminded him all too sharply that, until a few weekens ago, he had spent his days in a solitary cell, dim and quiet and small. The sudden assault on his senses, however benign, was far too reminiscent of a stint in the Aurora chair.

But Crichton blocked his way. "Whoa, whoa, where you goin', buddy? We only just got here."

Stark shook his head, trying to dislodge the voices and the music as if they originated inside his head rather than outside. "No," he muttered. "Too much, it's too much..."

Crichton gave him a sympathetic look and shrugged. "Well, if you want to go back to the ship and deal with D'Argo..."

That gave Stark pause. D'Argo had not been pleased to discover that the slavers who had his son were currently closed for business and thus not reachable until the end of their extended local holiday, and he'd been disturbingly inclined to take out his impatient frustration on everyone around him. Especially, for some reason, the person who'd brought him the unwelcome news. Stark looked around again, mentally comparing the benign chaos of the club to an encounter with an angry Luxan. "No," he said quickly. "No, this is fine."

"Good. Because I promised you a fun-filled night on the town, and damn it, we are _going_ to have fun!"

Crichton's smile, Stark thought, was just a little too wide, a little too forced. He wondered, not for the first time, what secrets lurked behind that slightly manic exterior. Stark knew all too well how much could be hidden behind one of those. And he'd thought he'd felt something, when he'd touched the human's spirit in the Gammak cell... Not that it was any of his business.

He followed Crichton across the room, through the press of bodies -- too many, too close -- and over to the bar, Crichton said something to the being behind the counter, and a moment later there was a drink in front of each of them. Stark sniffed his cautiously. He was fairly sure it contained alcohol, a substance he'd only ingested a few times in his life, and one for which Baniks had a notoriously low tolerance.

Crichton raised his glass. "A toast! To... freedom."

Stark smiled and raised his own glass in a careful imitation of Crichton's gesture. He was unsure quite what this custom was meant to be -- did Crichton's species always dedicate its drinking sessions in the name of abstract concepts? -- but he could certainly appreciate this particular choice of abstractions. "Freedom," he said, and drank. It burned pleasantly going down, and he found himself beginning to relax. The music seemed more like music now, and less like painful noise.

"Right," said Crichton, wiping his mouth. "Now, the first thing we're gonna do is..."

But apparently the first thing they were going to do wasn't whatever Crichton was intending to suggest, because at that moment two massive hands came crashing down on their shoulders. Stark turned his head to see that the hands belonged to someone who appeared to be Sebaceanoid, save that, as far as Stark could tell, he was made entirely of muscles.

"Somethin' we can help you with?" said Crichton.

"Yeah. I'm gonna have to ask you to get your slave to wait outside."

"My _what_?" The man's beefy head inclined slightly towards Stark. "OK, first of all, he's not my slave. He's my _friend_." Stark's head snapped up, his lips parted in wonder. _Friend?_ Crichton really considered him a friend?

"Frankly, the details of your personal life are of no interest to me. But the Banik goes outside. Now. Or I _take_ him outside." The man smiled humorlessly, revealing a double row of pointed teeth.

Stark hunched down under the crushing weight of the heavily-muscled hand. Small and meek. Be no threat, be no one worthy of notice, and sometimes they'd leave you alone.

"Oh, I get it," said Crichton. "What you're saying is, you don't like his kind in here." There was a dangerous gleam in Crichton's eye, an expression on his face that seriously hinted that he might, in fact, be entirely unstable, the sort of man any sane person ought to think twice about messing with. Well, all right. That worked as a strategy, too.

The bouncer, however, failed to take the hint. "Right," he said, and clamped his fingers in Stark's shirt, hauling him bodily from his stool.

Stark, adopting Crichton's approach with a long-practiced embellishment of his own, abruptly metamorphosed from cowering slave to screaming madman, howling and flailing and rolling his eye. The bouncer blinked and stumbled, not much, but it was enough of a distraction to allow Crichton to strike out with an amateurish pantak jab. The bouncer reeled backwards, losing his grip on Stark's clothing and sending him spinning into the Ilonic woman on the next stool, splattering her colorful drink all over her equally, but differently, colorful clothing. "Frell!" she said with a snarl, and pushed Stark away from her. He careened into someone else, and the someone else promptly stood up and slapped the Ilonic. Neither of them appeared to be paying much attention to him, so Stark turned from their fray back to his own. Adrenaline was surging through him now and interacting in interesting ways with the alcohol. He threw himself at the bouncer, who was apparently engaged in choking the life out of Crichton, and pounded on his back with his fists, screaming, until he finally dropped the human and turned around.

"You," said the man, "clearly need to have some obedience beaten into you, you uppity frellnik." His fingers scrabbled at Stark's face, aiming, most likely, to take out his eye. But, thanks to Stark's frenzied flailing, they caught at the corner of his mask instead. Light poured out as the metal parted from his face, and with it a memory -- painful and detailed and very, very vivid -- of being beaten for disobedience. The bouncer shrieked and fell to his knees, tears rolling down his face. A moment later, Stark fell over beside him.

The next thing he was entirely aware of, he and Crichton were being dumped on the sidewalk by someone who might very possibly have been the bouncer's twin sister.

"Stark?" said Crichton a few moments later. "You OK?"

"I think so." He patted his corporeal body tentatively. Nothing seemed to be broken, or even badly bruised. His mask was back in place, and the pain in his energy was fading. "Are you?"

"Yeah." Crichton paused for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. "Yeah, actually, I feel pretty good. Listen, thanks for saving my ass in there. Whatever you did to that guy, it was pretty damned effective."

"I... showed him what it was like to be me."

Crichton's laughter faded, and he gave Stark an odd look. Stark wondered if it were pity. "Well," Crichton said at last, "at least for a couple of seconds, he knew what it was like to be a better person." He smiled. Stark suddenly realized that his mouth was hanging open in surprise and struggled to shut it. "I'm, uh, I'm sorry that wasn't fun."

Stark considered that, breathing deep in the cool night air and leaning back against the outside of the building. He felt... something. A pleasantly warm sensation born of alcohol and satisfaction, a slowly fading adrenal tingle. He felt... Yes, that was it. _Alive._ "I think it _was_ fun," he said.

Crichton slapped him on the back and grinned.


End file.
